11:48:25 So, Melle, last week we ended our podcast on you creating HGPT for your books.
11:48:33 How did that go?
11:48:35 Yeah, so. I'm going to tell you straight up like many authors. I am very busy with a million other tasks.
11:48:45 And I didn't complete the GPT but I did do some efforts to I also kind of reevaluated where I need to start.
11:48:54 And before I got to that point, I wanted to start. With the reader profile, which maybe we can talk a bit about, because I don't think people know that we're going to be doing this case study.
11:49:06 So maybe we want to come back to that at the end of today's podcast.
11:49:09 That actually goes into what we're going to talk about because we're going to talk a lot about Facebook ads and knowing your reader profile is going to be key with the Facebook ads.
11:49:18 Did you see that LinkedIn post that I sent over on Amazon providing the free AI courses?
11:49:27 Right. Yeah, so it's really interesting because they're looking to develop their program or ecosystem.
11:49:35 The the integration, you know, and I think this is really important for authors because when we start looking at the amount of investment that Amazon and Google and Microsoft are making into AI technology, it's going to change not just our day to day in terms of you know Microsoft and Google but specifically with Amazon.
11:49:56 It's ultimately going to change how authors interact with the platform.
11:50:01 And how do you see? This change coming? Like what do you think authors are going to see?
11:50:07 Well, it's you know all of this you know I've got a crystal ball and I'm looking at my crystal ball, but you know I wanna make sure that this is done with the caveat that we will see what we see.
11:50:20 But the way that I think it's being indicated. Is that you're going to see automated tools becoming mainstream.
11:50:25 So you're going to see a lot more AI driven tools on the Amazon platform. It's going to help you with various publishing tasks.
11:50:32 So for example, you know, right now everybody's dropping their 60,000 word novels into tools like Claude 3 and asking it to come up with the Amazon product description with the aim of encouraging a reader to buy.
11:50:50 Right, so that's a way that you can get a blurb without ever having to write a blurb.
11:50:54 Just by using AI. I think in the future you're going to see AI. I think in the future you're going to see that opportunity from, Amazon itself.
11:51:01 So when you upload your manuscript, they will immediately start reading the manuscript with AI, which they already do.
11:51:08 And then they're going to start delivering. All your marketing materials, your metadata generation, your keyword optimization, your categories.
11:51:17 And your book blurb, I don't think that's going to be required to write anymore, any more than it is now, but it'll all be in one place.
11:51:27 I completely agree. I also think we're no longer enough to come up with our keywords or categories or anything.
11:51:35 I think Amazon is just going to. Automatically be able to. Do this for us.
11:51:40 Absolutely. I think that type of time consuming task is a thing of the past. I mean, we can, Yeah.
11:51:46 Well, that's the AI is. AI is all about saving us time.
11:51:50 Yeah, absolutely. You know, a couple other points on Amazon. I think you're going to see an increase emphasis on AI generated content.
11:51:59 The AI is becoming much more capable of generating readable text. So you will actually, you know, see more AI generated books on the platform.
11:52:10 And I think Amazon is going to support this because of their 1 billion dollars investment in the platform. We're also, you know, and this is something that I talk a lot to our corporate clients about.
11:52:23 We're going to see a change in the mindset. So right now there's a bit of a push back on a authors using AI.
11:52:30 I'm not a big fan of using AI to write a book, but that's because I enjoyed the writing process.
11:52:35 But I think you're going to see readers expectations and behaviors are going to shift.
11:52:40 You're going to see authors developing new skills and learning opportunities, which is, you know, why we started this podcast.
11:52:46 Marketing and sales strategies are going to shift and I know right now you know I'm sort of talking about the big the big waves of change that are going to happen.
11:52:57 I believe it's all going to lead to new publishing models. The rise of AI is AI and Amazon's ecosystem.
11:53:04 Will create, you know, subscription based access to AI generated stories, crowdsourcing, riding projects can become part of Amazon itself.
11:53:16 And I think that authors need to keep an eye out for these new models coming up and then seeing how it might affect their sales and their IP rights, their intellectual property rights.
11:53:26 I completely agree with all of that. Like I think we're going to see a lot of changes in how we publish as self publishers even as a trade publisher.
11:53:35 There's going to be a lot of, and I think they're actually most of it will be good for authors because it's good again.
11:53:42 Time management is going to save us a lot of time. On the administration stumped that authors don't particularly like like we all love to write our books and not and I'm like you, I prefer to write my own book.
11:53:55 I don't use AI to write my books. But I, but to be able to not have to worry about coming up with keywords and blurbs and categories and all of that stuff that takes a lot of time, authors.
11:54:06 I think it's going to be huge for. Authors to have those tools in Amazon.
11:54:12 Yeah, and I don't think it'll be long before you see those shifts in Amazon.
11:54:18 I'm talking 6 months to maybe 12 months out. I think they're rapidly changing internally and we'll see the results of that on the outside.
11:54:26 Yeah, I think so too.
11:54:27 One thing I want to what I want to mention here in the podcast and we've just set up our YouTube channel.
11:54:34 If you are interested in digging deep into these practical tools and methodologies. We're going to, it's not populated yet, but we're going to start adding in micro or mini videos.
11:54:47 To our AI publishing formula, YouTube channel. After our webinar this weekend, which we'll talk about later.
11:54:55 And so if you want to just dive in and be like, how does this tool look, you know, how does somebody use AI to get their book blurb.
11:55:03 You can go to the YouTube channel and we'll pop up a little video showing you exactly how that's done.
11:55:08 So you can get access to those tips, tricks and tools.
11:55:14 But here, in today, I know we were talking about ads. I want to talk specifically about Facebook ads because a lot of authors use Facebook ads to.
11:55:25 To sell their books and I think that people are looking for kind of you know what is the AI tool for Facebook ads but it never hurts to really understand and I think it's important to understand the fundamentals of Facebook ads.
11:55:39 So, Jamie, if you can in, you know, in a few sentences, maybe, maybe a little longer, give listeners an overview.
11:55:50 I know that you run a lot of ads for clients. I know you've run your own ads very successfully.
11:55:56 Can you explain the fundamentals of book advertising on Facebook with us?
11:56:01 So I think the 1st thing everyone needs to understand is there are a ton of readers on Facebook like that is Facebook is the platform where you can really reach a ton of readers and The biggest part of running an ad on Facebook is to know who your readers are.
11:56:21 We talked about this last week and it goes back to the reader profile. If you know who to target.
11:56:27 With your Facebook ads, your Facebook ads will be successful. So targeting your picking the right targets for your ads is really important.
11:56:38 And that is really the foundation of where you need to start when it comes to your Facebook ads because you have to know who you are targeting your ads to.
11:56:49 Then comes the rest to add copy and the graphics and you know the different formats you're going to run your ads on but what you really need to focus on 1st is who you're going to target your ads to.
11:57:00 And you could pull those targets from multiple different places. You can do a lookalike audience right from your Facebook page.
11:57:06 You could do a look like audience right from your mailing list. Or you can go and in manually put in targets.
11:57:14 And that comes down to your readers. Now there's tons of tools out there and I'm going to let you talk about them now because I know you've been playing around and looking at a lot of them and I'm interested to see which ones you think.
11:57:27 Are the most beneficial for authors.
11:57:30 Right, so. 1st of all, you know, a lot of people are using generative AI to deliver the content, right?
11:57:39 So when you look at the Facebook ads and you're changing your graphic and you're changing your and then you're changing your target audience.
11:57:47 That's the way they iterate on Facebook ads to figure out which one is the most effective for selling your book.
11:57:55 And so initially what we can do is we can use the methods that Jamie just talked about for targeting our ads.
11:58:04 We can create reader profiles using generative AI. We can create content for using generative AI and we can create graphics using generative AI.
11:58:14 And for anyone who's been creating their ad graphics using Gender to Bay I. It can compare that to the ones that you do with stock images.
11:58:22 You know that the generative AI created graphics are actually delivering a lot more clicks and and.
11:58:31 In ads than a stock image. And that's that's part of the shift that we're going to see.
11:58:37 You know, in in 6 months to a year, you won't see any things that don't have some AI graphic around it, whether it's even a filter or whether it's, you know, a piece of a graphic.
11:58:53 And I know I'm going a little sideways on this, but for those of you who've used Shutterstock, if you go to Shutterstock right now, they have a tool inside of Shutterstock that creates an AI.
11:59:05 And honestly, that is the way, that's the way the whole industry is headed. Okay, but let's so now we know and I think your average listener or average author understand how you know generative AI is used in advertisement but I want to talk a little bit about machine learning and predictive analytics because we don't hear as much about these things unless we're a programmer, which I am
11:59:33 not. But I think we need to understand these key terms. Okay, because machine learning and predictive analytics are all part of artificial intelligence.
11:59:45 And they have really distinct applications in marketing and advertising. So machine learning, this is where you've got the trained algorithms.
11:59:54 It is what Amazon, Facebook, run on, Google, they run on these things. They learn from the data and then they make predictions and decisions without being explicitly programmed.
12:00:09 So there's no guy in the background. This is, you know, the algorithm we all talk about when we talk about, oh, I hit the Amazon algorithm and now my book is number 5 in the store.
12:00:19 And that's machine learning at work. So when you talk about, advertising, the machine learning algorithms, they analyze large data sets and they identify patterns.
12:00:29 So that they can optimize the wide targeting. And these are some of the tools that are going on in the background with both Amazon ads and with Facebook ads.
12:00:38 They're analyzing the creative elements and helping you with the bid strategies. This is all based on your historical on not just your historical performance data, but the historical performance data of everything that is in their ad.
12:00:55 Environment. So the thing, the thing that I know is that many authors are skeptical about this tool because of course even with machine learning, you can gear it towards, well, let's just make it so that, you know, Facebook makes more money.
12:01:12 So Amazon makes more money. And this is where I think the intelligence that you have as an individual who knows your market, who knows your target, who understands what they're looking for in terms of creative elements.
12:01:26 You understand your budget so you know what you're bidding strategies should be. And so this human element must be involved no matter how clever their machine learning is.
12:01:35 I've seen a lot of authors who are using some of the machine learning capabilities inside of Facebook and they're coming up short and they're not real fans of it.
12:01:43 So what I would say is that it's going to get better. It's going to get more targeted and easier to use.
12:01:50 But in the 1st element, you really need to understand the fundamentals. Of of advertising on these platforms.
12:02:00 Absolutely. And Facebook right now, I mean, they will already automatically. Like pick your targets for you, they don't tell you what they are, they're based on the, you know, the engagement that you're using to run your ads.
12:02:14 But you don't have a lot of say in. What those are. You can put additional targets in, but some you can just click.
12:02:22 And they will just show your ads to who they think. Well best. Best represents your product. I have found I have land those ads and I find that my ads run better when I put my targets in.
12:02:37 And I think what why is because our Facebook pages for our authors. Most of them are pretty organic.
12:02:48 Like our likes are from our readers or people who found our profiles, things like that. But we also have people there like our family members.
12:02:51 And a lot of especially starting out authors, most people like that have liked or followed their page that they're running their ads from, our family members who are specifically Who their audience really is.
12:03:05 So Facebook isn't seeing. Who their real audience is. They're seeing their family numbers. And what their family members are actually looking for on Facebook.
12:03:17 So that's why I think it's really important that you know which targets you can put in.
12:03:22 Who your audience is because Facebook isn't always going to get it right.
12:03:26 Yeah, I think that's a great point. You know, and in fact, I just made a note for a future podcast about growing your real audience.
12:03:34 Because of course the most organic way to grow it book and at the back of the book there's a URL that they go to and then they give you your email address or they go to your their email address or they go to your Facebook page and and like your Facebook page.
12:03:49 You know, they go to your Facebook page and like your Facebook page. And like your Facebook page. You know, and that's a great way to organically grow it, but how do you grow it?
12:03:55 And we're not going to talk about it, but how, how do you grow it? And we're not going to talk about this now.
12:03:56 We will cover it in a future, podcast. You know, I remember when I was starting out, you know, it was so confusing.
12:04:03 Like, how do I grow my list? You know, how do I find out where, you know, what people are, you know, the type of person who is reading this book.
12:04:11 So we'll talk about that.
12:04:12 I know like when I 1st started my Facebook page for my author name. I know the 1st 50 to 100 people were friends and family.
12:04:21 Yeah.
12:04:21 I know that. And you know, now I think I have like 30,000 followers or something like that.
12:04:27 And now I have that organic. Audience that I could pull from but I did not have that when I started.
12:04:35 Yeah.
12:04:35 I had to know who I was targeting with what we didn't have all this. Technology either back then but I had to know what targets to put in and who my audience was to run my ads.
12:04:46 That's so funny. I love how you say like back then like it was the dark ages and it was like, 2016.
12:04:52 I mean a lot has changed. A lot has changed.
12:04:52 It wasn't long ago. Give it. Well, and you know, the thing about AI is that it's changing on steroids because AI is writing itself.
12:05:04 It is, you know, we're setting it up in some of these programming circles I've moved in to write its own programs.
12:05:13 You know, create the code for a program that can do XYZ. You know, I went into Excel the other day and I was having it create all my pivot tables to you know analyze large data sets.
12:05:23 You know, so because it's creating itself, it's going to advance at a speed like we've never seen before in technology, which is amazing.
12:05:31 So much.
12:05:30 We're already seeing you. Yeah, we're already seeing it.
12:05:34 Okay, so the last thing I we went a little bit off track, but I want to go back to predictive analytics.
12:05:41 So we're talking about the technology used inside of these large organizations like Google and Amazon specifically and Facebook.
12:05:50 What comes, it takes the historical data, the statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques, and then it uses those to forecast the future outcomes and trends.
12:06:02 And so in advertising, you'll see that predictive analytics can help advertisers to.
12:06:09 Determine what audience behavior will probably do. What the campaign performance probably will be and then various market trends.
12:06:18 So today we use a lot of like K-lytics to be like, hey, what happened a month ago?
12:06:21 Well, predictive analytics can actually go . There and be like, hey, we think based on what's happened over the last 2 years, that this is how this ad is going to perform, or this is what we think is going to be the next great market.
12:06:35 And what we're looking for at AI publishing formula are affordable because I know where the expensive tools are. Trust me.
12:06:42 I'd have seen them at work and this is what the big business is doing. They are using machine learning and predictive analytics to create their business models of the future.
12:06:53 And what I'm on the hunt for are affordable tools for authors to be able to use this type of information.
12:07:01 We plan out our business strategies.
12:07:04 And we've actually talked to a few companies that have these tools and we even talked them about how the authors need these tools and it needs to be affordable.
12:07:17 They're not big corporations looking for these tools. They're individuals looking for the same tools that the corporations are working are using, but they need to be able to afford it.
12:07:25 Yup. And they're, there's a couple of really great tools like Kindle Pranur and Kaleitics that are going part of the way there.
12:07:35 You know, they're using some of this information to give you an idea. But, but I know that there's more technology that isn't necessarily focused on the author market yet.
12:07:46 But can and will be in the future.
12:07:48 Absolutely.
12:07:51 So let's talk, you brought up an interesting thing about the audience targeting. So what I'd like to to hear about is you know you talked about.
12:08:08 Look-alike audience. Can you describe exactly what that is to me?
12:08:14 So look like audience and there's, multiple. Ways to look like audience can be created but for one example is you can use your Facebook page, your author page and you can go into your Facebook and ask it to create a lookalike based on who is already like your page.
12:08:33 And now you have this, you know, 2 billion. People, 2 million readers who are similar to the readers you already have.
12:08:41 The Facebook will show your ads too.
12:08:46 Yeah. And so that's really interesting. For those of you who don't know, you know, I am a bit familiar with creating a lookalike audience.
12:08:57 It is something inside of Facebook that you know you you click the button and it starts to build that for you.
12:09:03 There are outside tools such as ad critter. It runs at $149 a month so unless you're making a lot of money in your books.
12:09:14 You're not going to want to spend that. So that's 1 example of a tool. You can do a 30 day trial to see if that works for you.
12:09:23 Okay.
12:09:23 And then there's a lot of larger look-alike modeling tools such as the one from NG Data.
12:09:31 But we will we will dive deeper into that. The reason why I wanted to bring this up is that I haven't done ads in a long time.
12:09:42 And Jamie and I are looking. Oh, heavily into. How we can use my publishing as a case study.
12:09:50 And I think, you know, we've got about 8 min left. We've got a couple of exciting things to talk about.
12:09:56 We finish today's podcast. But the last thing I really want to say about ads, because I think this is really important and it's 1 of the 1st things I was told when I started going into ad creation is that we are all authors and we are storytellers and the thing that engages an audience better than anything else for ads is a good story.
12:10:19 So. We are naturally, we might walk around saying like, oh, I'm not a marketer.
12:10:24 I'm not a sales person. But in reality, we're a storyteller. And you know, that's that's the nature of who we are.
12:10:32 In our core and that allows us to write, you know, one sentence stories that we can drop in an ad.
12:10:40 So by all means, use generative AI to deliver your visuals to deliver your storytelling to get some persuasive copywriting, but use your innate talent and skill as a author to capture the audience's attention and drive your conversions in the ads.
12:10:57 So it doesn't matter how How amazing the AI tools are going to be. It still is going to take human refinement and intelligence to get the exact results you're looking for.
12:11:11 So based on that, what I want to do is I want to tell you guys, Jamie and I had a long talk and you all know that she's a 7 figure author.
12:11:24 And what we wanted to do was we wanted to give you a in very clear insight about how do you build an author brand and to do that we're going to be using . As a case study or at the rat in the lab as it were.
12:11:42 So we're going to do a mix. We're building a case study out within our course structure and that's going to be available to all of our current clients. And that's going to be available to all of our current clients, who have that.
12:11:54 So they're going to be available to all of our current clients who have that. So they're going to be able to watch along.
12:11:56 We're doing a nine-month case study. It's going to run from May first, st which is tomorrow, until December, the 31st and we're going to kick that off on our YouTube channel also.
12:12:08 I'm going to go on to the YouTube channel. I'm going to tell you a lot about my publishing career probably more than anybody.
12:12:22 I'm going to be really open. I'm going to show you where I currently stand financially, where how much money I've made over the last, how many years I've been publishing 8 years that I've been publishing and what we're going to work on.
12:12:36 We're going to use our AI capabilities. Jamie is going to provide her coaching and we're going to work together to grow that particular pen name and account for where it's at right now to where we'd like it to be.
12:12:51 And it's not, we're not going crazy numbers, but we have a goal and we're going to introduce all of that as our 1st YouTube video.
12:13:00 And it'll be me introducing that and then we'll set the goals and then people will be able to watch as we progress and use the different AI tools.
12:13:09 And one of the other things we want to emphasize is that As we've discussed before, there are you know, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of AI tools coming out in the market today.
12:13:19 They're not all going to work. And we're going to plug some in and we're going to run with them for a month or so and which we do and then they don't work so we throw them away and we try a new one.
12:13:28 So those are the opportunities that we have. There are some industries that we've dug really deeply into and publishing is absolutely one of them.
12:13:38 So we're excited to start showing you some of those tips, tools, and tricks in our YouTube channel and also let you follow along at a high level on the study that we're making available to all of our clients.
12:13:55 So, and what you will find out, this is kind of going back to the very beginning of the conversation when Jamie asked me, did I do my, my GPT for my series?
12:14:06 And the answer was no, it also has to do with time management because what you'll see is that, you know, I run a business and I have 2 kids and I have a husband and everybody's very busy.
12:14:17 And so how do you fit growing a platform or a pen name? When you've only got one or 2 h in a day.
12:14:25 And, you know, spoiler alert, I will not be using AI to write books, but I will show you where and how I plug AI into my publishing process so you can see that for yourself.
12:14:38 What's nice about AI too is say you only have 2 hours a day or some people 2 hours a week.
12:14:44 To build your author. Brand. AI gives you that opportunity to take that 2 hours and make it more like 6.
12:14:54 Because now you're focusing that 2 hours on writing your book and you can write that. Yourself without AI tools.
12:15:02 And then use your the AI tools which we will continue to talk about in the next forever. On how to use those tools to streamline in the rest of your author business.
12:15:15 Yeah. And I think, you know, and I've even got tips and tricks on how to write a book in 5 days without AI.
12:15:23 So I'll be sharing that. And I've been doing that since 2017.
12:15:30 We'll be talking a little bit about how I structural that and what my process is specifically.
12:15:36 You can maybe find some things in there that you can use for your own process.
12:15:43 Jamie? We have a webinar coming up on Saturday. Did you want to talk a little bit about that?
12:15:52 Be with you.
12:15:50 Yes, it's my favorite day of the year, May the 4.th You would, yes. And actually we're going to talk about streamlining your your author business using AI tools.
12:16:04 And it's absolutely the number one question we get, you know, everyone I think has a pretty good handle on how do you write a book with AI or generative AI.
12:16:14 How do you do very, you know, doing the ads, doing the book blurbs, like if anyone's writing a book blurb nowadays, I think you're, You need to really look at AI tools to how to how to do that because it does end up saving you so much time and streamlining your business and saving you money if you're outsourcing it and it's actually getting you
12:16:39 better results because AI tools can aggregate and analyze a ton of information and feed that back to you so it's looking at real data around what's a keyword.
12:16:52 It's not just what somebody thought about as they were reading your book. So even if you're writing yourselves and it takes you 30 min, you know, it'll take AI 1 min.
12:17:02 So now you've saved yourselves 29 min in your life.
12:17:08 Okay.
12:17:08 And it will optimize blurb to help you in your in the Amazon algorithm.
12:17:12 Yep, exactly, exactly. So then the last thing I'm going to say, there's actually there's 2 more things.
12:17:20 One is that
12:17:28 During our webinar. We are going to be making an offer. And it's 1 of our, it's 1 of the last offers of this kind that we're ever going to do because we've decided that we're going to shift our business model a little bit, which will also, you know, provide some insight into during the webinar.
12:17:47 However.
12:17:50 We're putting an Easter egg in this podcast. If you use the code: AIPF3
12:18:01 That is the number 3. The code is again AIPF3. That will get you a discount on the offer we make during the webinar.
12:18:18 If you're listening to this months after the webinar, we're actually going to do something to keep that live for you anyhow.
12:18:28 You can go in and look up this offer and use that code still.
12:18:33 Right, because we will be recording the webinar.
12:18:36 Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And then the last thing that I want to let you know, and I think this is this is the roadmap that everybody's been looking for. So what we're going to make available to everybody who registers in the webinar is a infographic.
12:19:20 It's the it's the publishing process and then we're going to show little lines where we are currently implementing AI in both of our publishing process and Jamie and I use a similar one.
12:19:33 She's just a little more active in hers than I am. So we're going to show you where AI can be used in every step of the publishing process and that will be a free PDF that will be downloadable to everyone.
12:19:48 I think that's it for me, Jamie. Do you have any final comments? For today.
12:19:53 You want to give anybody homework?
12:19:55 Well, you still have your GPT you need to create.
12:19:57 Yes, boss.
12:19:59 And I think the main goal from today was to understand your readers and start working on that reader profile.
12:20:09 Cause once you have your reader profile, you can't, you know who you're targeting with your Facebook ads.
12:20:15 Absolutely. And you know, I've got a note for the reader profile because I spoke in depth about this at 20Books but I think that we're I'm going to provide a mini course a mini video on it in our YouTube channel also because I think it's a really really quick and easy way for people to understand their genre, understand their market and understand their audience.
12:20:40 So thank you so much, everybody for listening. Really excited to see you this Saturday on our webinar Streamline Your Author Business with AI the registration link for that is below. So have an awesome day everyone.
